Chattanooga Zoo Announces Baby Hellbenders
The Chattanooga Zoo announces the successful hatching of a group of Hellbender eggs collected from the wild here in East Tennessee.
The Chattanooga Zoo has been working on Hellbender conservation on-site and in-field since 2009. Due to catastrophic population collapse across the state, the Chattanooga Zoo teamed up with the Nashville Zoo’s Ectotherm department to collect eggs and begin setting up a head start program for east and middle Tennessee. Working in partnership with the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency, the Nashville Zoo, The University of Tennessee, and Lee University, they will rear this group of juvenile hellbenders for several years until they are mature enough to monitor in the wild. Once they reach maturity, they will be released into a suitable stream in East Tennessee where species sightings no longer occur.
